A new banking law, the Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act (“Check 21 Act”), took effect in October 2004. The Check 21 Act permits banks and institutions to substitute a paper check with a substitute check bearing a reprint of an electronic image of the check to create a legally binding transaction. The Check 21 Act also created an environment where banks and their customers could exchange check images in lieu of paper checks to negotiate payments and deposits. Prior to the enactment of the Check 21 Act, financial institutions and businesses were required to collect, bundle, and submit paper checks to the respective issuing banks at the end of the business day. In some instances a financial institution were required to make multiple courier runs each day to submit collected paper checks to a check processing facility. This process was time-consuming, inefficient, and cost-ineffective.
In some instances a check processing facility provided financial institutions and/or businesses with computer software. The computer software was installed on a computer located at the financial institution or business and was used to transmit images of paper checks to a remote server with large data storage capabilities. Under this arrangement, the financial institutions and businesses have to deal with the added step of installing and updating the software on their computers whenever a new version of the software is released. Moreover, the software creates a heavy memory footprint on the computer.
Furthermore, in an effort to reduce the support costs and heavy memory footprint of fat-client software required to be present on a computer's hard drive, check image submission software has also been provided through an Internet web browser. In such a thin-client configuration, the functionality of the submission software is provided to the user through an Internet web browser, but the software code resides on a sever computer at a remote location. Once a user authenticates himself/herself using the web browser interface, the user can submit check images and check image data to a remote banking webserver through the web browser. A thin-client configuration results in a smaller memory footprint on a client computer. Also, a thin-client configuration alleviates the added step of individually installing fat-client software on computers located at the financial institutions and businesses. However, in industries such as banking where security is of a major importance, a thin-client configuration poses some security risks.
Since the aforementioned configuration permits any authorized user to access online banking functionality from any Internet-accessible computer with a web browser, there is a need in the art to provide systems and methods with added security to the sensitive banking data being transmitted.